Pakistan ranked 2nd with largest number of children out of school

With 25 million children out of school across the country, Pakistan is only second to Nigeria,beating India which has a-billion-plus population, in the world with the most number of children out of school, says the annual report released on Friday by the Society for the Protection of Childrenâ€™s Right (SPARC)

The report titled â€˜The State of Pakistanâ€™s Children 2011â€™ paints a grim picture of the status of children in the country as various development indicators suggest that the children here lag behind in many basic facilities (mainly education and health) that are universally considered as their inalienable right.

Given the state of affairs, the report concludes, Pakistan, as a low-income developing country, will fail to achieve many of the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015.

Education

The National Education Census 2006

estimates that of 227,791 educational institutions in the country, only 1,081 were pre-primary (of which 73 percent were in the private sector).

â€œWhen the basic education system is being run by the private sector, the government is not fulfilling its basic responsibility towards its citizens. When the state fails to provide something as fundamental as primary education it is certain that the country is on the right course,â€™ said Nazra Jahan, a representative of SPARC.

One of the major obstacles to basic education in the country is the destruction of the infrastructure by floods in Sindh and Balochistan and terrorism in Khyber Pakhtunwha. The most decent figures emerged out of Punjab where the Net Enrolment Rate (NER) is 61 percent and the infrastructure system is comparatively better than all the other provinces.

There are around 11.6 million illiterate youths in Pakistan, 64 percent of them females. The report claims that the number of illiterate youths is growing with no substantial efforts to increase the number of and access to technical and vocational institutes and to address gender disparities.

Provincially, the worst conditions are observed in Sindh where 35 percent of schools are without a building, and in many cases, a boundary wall. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Punjab follow with 23 percent, 18 percent and 10 percent, respectively. There are around 30,000 ghost schools throughout Pakistan that continue to receive funding.

Health

In the health sector, Pakistan ranks among the top five countries in the world with the largest number of children under five who are â€œmoderately or severely underweightâ€. In 2011, the national wasting rate in Pakistan was 15.1 percent compared to 13.1 percent. Forty-three percent of children born in Pakistan in the year 2011 were afflicted by stunting (low height for age) according to the National Nutrition Survey.

The HIV prevalence in Pakistan has nearly doubled from 11 percent to 21 percent between 2005 and 2008 and it was found that injected users (IDUs) contributed heavily to the spread of AIDS in the country, according to UNAIDS. Pakistan also ranks 6th among the 22 high-burden tuberculosis (TB) countries in the world with 181 cases of TB per 1,000 people.

Pakistan is also responsible for nearly 30 percent of all polio cases reported worldwide with 197 cases reported from different parts of the country.

Has the census counted students in Madrasas as part of the list or are they excluded.

Click to expand...

Good point. I was thinking about the same thing. Madrassas are also schools. Moreover, even a teenager being trained to become a suicide bomber is a student, because he is learning something, regardless of the fact that he will use his skills only once, and won't live to enjoy the fruits of his labours.